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February 13, 2013

[But after a seemingly
endless series of scandals, the 85-year-old who so ably enforced doctrine for
his predecessor, Pope
John Paul II, seemingly came to understand that only a new pope, one
with far greater energies than he, could lead a global church and clean house
inside the hierarchy at its helm. In the end, Vatican experts said, he decided
he could best serve the church by resigning, a momentous decision with
far-reaching implications that are still not fully understood.]

Early
Tuesday, lights were on in Pope Benedict XVI’s apartment overlooking

St.
Peter’s Square.

VATICAN CITY —
Just days after Pope
Benedict XVI returned from a 2010 trip to Britain where he met
the queen and mended fences with the Anglicans, prosecutors in Rome impounded
$30 million from the Vatican Bank in an investigation linked to money
laundering.

In May, soon after the
pope made an address on the priesthood, chastising those who sought to stretch
the church’s rules and calling for “radical obedience,” Vatican gendarmes
arrested Benedict’s butler on charges of theft after a tell-all book appeared,
based on stolen confidential documents detailing profound mismanagement and
corruption inside the Vatican.

Benedict had hoped that
his papacy would rekindle the Catholic faith in Europe and compel Catholics to
forge bonds between faith and reason, as he so loved to do.

But after a seemingly
endless series of scandals, the 85-year-old who so ably enforced doctrine for
his predecessor, Pope
John Paul II, seemingly came to understand that only a new pope, one
with far greater energies than he, could lead a global church and clean house
inside the hierarchy at its helm. In the end, Vatican experts said, he decided
he could best serve the church by resigning, a momentous decision with
far-reaching implications that are still not fully understood.

“It wasn’t one thing,
but a whole combination of them” that caused him to resign, said Paolo Rodari,
a Vatican expert at the Italian daily newspaper Il Foglio. Clerical sex abuse
scandals battered the papacy relentlessly, erupting in the United States,
Ireland and across Europe, all the way to Australia.

But the most recent, the
scandal involving the butler, “was a constant drumbeat on the pope,” he said,
hitting close to home — literally where the pope lived. In the end, Mr. Rodari
said, the message was, “I can’t change things, so I will erase everything.”

While the pope clearly
has been losing strength in recent years, some Vatican experts saw Benedict’s
decision less as a sign of frailty than one of strength that sent a clear
message — and a challenge — to the Vatican prelates whose misdeeds he had
struggled to rein in: No one is irreplaceable, not even the pope.

Even the Vatican
acknowledged this. “The pope is someone of great realism,” the Vatican
spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said on Tuesday. “And he knows very well
what the problems and the difficulties are.”

Father Lombardi added:
“I think this decision sends many messages to all of us, of humility, courage,
of wisdom in evaluating one’s situation before God.” He said the resignation
could “open the door for a potential wave of resignations” — including from
within the administrative body known as the Curia, Massimo Franco, a political
columnist at the Corriere della Sera daily newspaper and an expert in relations
between Italy and the Vatican, wrote on Tuesday.

A weak manager further
weakened by age — the Vatican said for the first time on Tuesday that the pope
had a pacemaker— Benedict apparently no longer felt equal to the task of
governing an institution that had lacked a strong leader for over a decade,
ever since John Paul II began a slow descent into Parkinson’s disease.

It was another
scandal-marred trip, this one to Mexico and Cuba in March, that seems to have
finally persuaded Benedict to consider the idea of stepping aside, Vatican
officials said.

The visit to Mexico was haunted by the specter of
the Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, the Mexican founder of the Legionaries of
Christ, a powerful and deeply conservative religious order with close ties to
John Paul’s papacy. Before he died in 2008, Father Maciel was found to have
raped seminarians, fathered several children and engaged in drug abuse.

Throughout the visit,
victims’ groups and other advocates organized news conferences and other events
to call attention to what they saw as the church’s dismal record on sexual
abuse, even though Benedict, as the Vatican’s chief doctrinal officer, had
reopened an investigation into Father Maciel that ultimately disclosed his
double life. But he failed to address the issue in Mexico, upsetting victims’
groups there and around the world. When he became pope, Benedict knew of what
he spoke, but he struggled to make the mighty wheels of a 1,000-year-old
bureaucracy turn smoothly.

Benedict’s first
missteps were seen as problems of communications. When in 2006 he quoted a
Byzantine emperor saying Islam had brought things “evil and inhuman,” remarks
that helped provoke riots in which several people died, the Vatican said his
words had been misinterpreted. Clearly pained, he visited Turkey as a way to
make amends.

In 2009, when Benedict
lifted the excommunication of four schismatic bishops, one of whom had denied
the scope of the Holocaust, the Vatican — and the pope — said the gesture was
aimed at healing a rift in the church, not at offending. Officials also
admitted they had failed to use the Internet to research the bishop’s views.

But later that same
year, when the Vatican shocked many, including the archbishop of Canterbury, by
announcing a new structure to
welcome traditionalist Anglicans back into Catholicism, it became clear that
the crisis of communications might in fact be a crisis of governance.

The Vatican official
then in charge of the church’s relations with Anglicans, Cardinal Walter
Kasper, said he had not been informed of the new structure, which had been
announced in an impromptu news conference by a different Vatican office when he
was out of town.

As a theologian intent
on making overtures to the more traditionalist elements of the church, and
lacking John Paul’s charisma, Benedict was bound to ruffle some feathers. But
the fatal flaw of his papacy, Vatican experts say, and a leading cause of the
scandals and missteps, is that he did not choose the right deputies to make the
institution run well.

“The daily running of
the shop is in such disarray because he doesn’t consult with anybody,” said
Robert Mickens, a Vatican expert for The Tablet, a London-based Catholic
weekly.

“The major problem of
this pontificate is his choice of Bertone as secretary of state, and his
insistence in keeping him there,” he added, referring to Cardinal Tarcisio
Bertone. “This has angered and alienated people. He put a non-diplomat in the
office that deals mostly with people who were trained to be diplomats, and he’s
not very diplomatic.”

Vatican experts
speculate that the scandal over the butler leaking confidential information was
part of a complex power battle within the Vatican by factions that wanted to
undermine Cardinal Bertone, a canon lawyer and a former archbishop of Genoa.

In January 2012, letters
emerged in the Italian news media and later a book, “Your
Holiness,” in which a high-ranking Vatican official said he had discovered
corruption and mismanagement in the awarding of construction contracts and said
that Cardinal Bertone had been influenced by Italian political circles.

In a letter, the official,
Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, then the second-ranking official of the part of
the Curia that administers Vatican City, implored both Benedict and Cardinal
Bertone to allow him to stay in a job overseeing the Holy See’s financial
affairs. Instead, Benedict transferred Archbishop Viganò to become the papal
nuncio, a diplomatic post, in Washington.

And he stood by Cardinal
Bertone even after the pope’s butler, Paolo Gabriele, was arrested in May 2012
on charges he took confidential documents that wound up in the book. In
October, Mr. Gabriele was sentenced to 18 months of house arrest in the
Vatican, but over the Christmas holidays, Benedict pardoned him.

Mr. Franco wrote in
Corriere della Sera that Benedict was believed to be distraught by a secret
report compiled by the three cardinals that the pope had appointed to
investigate the leaks scandal.

As the scandals piled
up, it was clear that the pope was increasingly tired, his voice strained, his
face drained. But although the resignation was related to a series of painful
personal defeats, Benedict’s act was expected to resonate through history.

“It’s revolutionary,”
said Eamon Duffy, a professor of the history of Christianity at Cambridge.
“He’s sweeping away the mystical in favor of the utilitarian: That being a pope
is a job, and the pope must be in the condition to do the job.”

Elisabetta Povoledo contributed reporting from
Rome, and Laurie Goodstein from New York.